Talk Amongst Yourselves

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Saw Portal 2 in my collection and like SiN: Emergence, I actually started and was nearly at the end of that game when it first came out.

Somehow lost my save files so I had to start again but hey, it just mean I got to listen to the wise words of Cave Johnson again.

Anyhow, booted it up and finished in one evening. And I'm glad as it looks as though the game it ageing well anymore. On three of the puzzles, a certain texture failed to load correctly (despite me being fully patched) thus looked like a QR code rather than metal.

But at least that is another game of my mountain of shame.

Now excuse me, I'm off to enjoy some Aperture lemonade in an asbestos cup.

[Hey @zambayoshi] I was mainly playing Ever Oasis this weekend. It's surprisingly addictive and once the annoying Fi/Navi clone stops telling you what to do every four seconds it opens up nicely.

Imagine the Tarrey Town parts of Breath of the Wild + Zelda-lite combat, and you pretty much have this game. I'd recommend it to anyone, as long as you know its not really a super-deep game. It's a bit sad its not a Switch/3DS crossover game, but that could be said of any of the four big 3DS releases this winter (Hey Pikmin, Miitopia, Ever Oasis, Metroid)

and the starter motor seems to have died in the car, fun.. Looking around online it's meant to be easy to replace, I beg to differ since I can't get enough clearance under the car to get in there comfortably to unbolt it. Ugh.

I used to have to start my e30 by holding the ignition while bashing the end of the starter with a breaker bar. Those starters had a thing for sticky solenoids, and the one time i got fed up and swapped the whole thing the replacement was just as bad.

I've beaten a few more games. First game was Battlefield: Hardline. I'm on the side that the BF should never have a campaign. At most they should just have skirmish games or scripted disassociated levels to teach class and vehicle basics. BF3 was forgettable and BF4 was trying so hard to be CoD but failed on all levels.

However, Hardline was pleasantly surprising. It embraced the camp from old Miami Vice TV shows so all the overblown set pieces strangely enough felt appropriate.

Adding in stealth segments was the real highlight. It was simple and you could easily abuse it, but there was a sense of satisfaction from silently handcuffing every guy without triggering an alarm. It was a bit weird that they would lie on the ground, awake but without making a sound (even though they had Zzz symbols above their head) and there's a point in the story where it makes no sense why you could even flash your badge any more, but really I enjoyed the game.

As for the multiplayer, I really got into the beta when it was happening and really enjoyed it. I seriously don't get all the complaints over a game that was trying something new. Maybe it was just hold over anger from BF4, or maybe those battlepacks were really annoying. But without them the game still has a simple progression system and currency to buy the items you want. Although it is annoying you can't upgrade your favoured weapon without 100 kills. The game is pretty much dead too, searching for Australian servers revealed so many empty games, with the occasional boosting server.

Second game I played was Infamous: Second Son. I liked the first game, own but haven't played the second, looking up some opinions a lot of people think the third game is the weakest. So I decided to start that up and get to the second game later.

This game is alright, but there were several developer decisions to speed up the game that I think hurt it.
The best thing about the game is probably the story, it's really well done with likable characters. I found myself really enjoying the brothers interactions with each other, how they constantly argue but have each others back, by the end they both taught each other valuable lessons. The villain is pretty good, staying a line below being pointlessly evil but still making you hate her. Only problem I can think of is that the story goes by too quick. Several more missions could have helped.

Graphically the game looks good and pretty colourful, especially with the neon powers. They even make concrete look decent.

As for gameplay they seemed more focused on making it faster, which I didn't like. I like in the first game how everything wasn't so fast, climbing up buildings required some thought. You unlock abilities that make it a little bit easier and eventually get to grind on rails, which feel much more rewarding for getting across the city. But in Second Son you just hold down dash and fly right over skyscrapers. With regenerative health and the removal of the cover system this kinda slows down the gameplay of throwing what you've got, getting hit, dashing away and waiting. I think games like this needs a health system.

I was also kinda annoyed that you couldn't swap between powers, had to absorb them. You would think this could add a system of attrition to combat, but instead you just spam attacks, dash away, refill with whatever, come back.

Also the boss fights were really weak. Probably the only decent one is the third boss fight (even then you're limited to smoke powers) but story wise it had more emotion to it. The final fight sucks, you basically dodge attacks until the game gives you your last power (right at the end of the game, thanks) and then you just spam projectiles on a huge health bar until the credits roll.

The morality system makes even less sense here then previously, you basically choose good or evil at the start of the game and then some missions and upgrades are locked out, despite still appearing in game. I guess you could decide to swap half way through, but the grind to switch is too large it's best just to start over.

Woo.
Went to Echuca today with the parents, got a stubbie holder from the paddle steamer with my beer, then we went to the pub and I won $7 on Keno. Then, for poops and giggles, I put 2 $1 coins into the pokies. Went to one machine, put the dollar in, got nothing. Moved to the machine to the left, put the dollar in, won several free spins, ended up winning $30 from the pokies.
Now sitting on my computer with some of the chocolate port I bought from the chocolate shop up there.
Today was a good day. :D

Launched the first rocket on Saturday night, after about 75hrs playtime on that map. Figure I'll keep going until I finish all the research, which will also give me a good idea of how much iron/copper smelting I need to keep up with everything in the factory running at full throughput - which is currently not happening. Currently on the "not enough iron production" side of the iron/copper see-saw, but thanks to a couple of trains fetching ore from huge distant deposits, I should be able to get away with just expanding the smelting areas... I'll probably just double it and see how the ore supply holds up.

Apparently the crosseyed one shows an inverted image (usually image sinks in to the picture), where as the other method shows it popping out of the image. I know some people who can do both (wish I was one of them), but I know way more people who can't see them at all!

Thats right, the image is inverted if you go cross eyed.
I can view them both ways, i actually have trouble if looking at things like security doors or keyboards that they merge into 'ultra 3D' and pop forwards towards me.
I spent way too much time in my youth free viewing side by side 3D I think.

Everything I have seen about it just screamed destiny. There is no way this is a "bioware game" in the traditional sense of the term.
Not to say it will not be good for those who like that style of game, but will disappoint those who go in expecting deep storytelling

I have seen nothing to indicate that it's not just EA's response to Destiny... from the "10 year plan" to the near scene-for-scene parity between the reveal and Destiny's 2013 gameplay reveal. Still, it's Bioware, so I expect an at least passable campaign, so I'll pick it up regardless... although their track record these past five years hasn't really been that great...

It's funny they were livestreaming multiplayer earlier and when they announced it on twitter 90% of the responses were complaining about it not being a single player game. The other 10% were begging a Jade Empire sequel.

I previously (2.0 release) burned out because I couldn't get a group that could beat the Garuda fight which meant I stalled out on the main story quest. Got up to it this time and was pretty scared going in. Didn't need to be, absolutely thrashed it.

Hit 50 on my Rogue/Ninja and immediately went and unlocked Samurai and Red Mage. I can't make sense of how to play Red Mage just yet, but Samurai seems fucking awesome. Hits much harder than Ninja but less utility and speed. Really like the feel of it. Basically have 3 combo sequences that each give you a buff and result in one of three resources, then you have a resource consumer that does a different attack depending on whether you had 1, 2 or 3 of those available to consume. I'm probably going to switch main class to Samurai, I'm that impressed with how it plays. Plus the gear looks cooler (Ninja set looks kind of horrible, with a really stupid boob window on the female set).

About to enter the endgame for 2.0 the main story quest, just unlocked Cape Westwind. I'll be trying to get through it tonight. I'm told that the final two dungeons (Castrum Meridanum and The Praetorium) are basically speed-runned nowadays and if you try and watch cutscenes you'll get locked out of everything so I guess I'm watching everything on Youtube beforehand. :( They really should fix this, it's utter shit that you're forced to skip all of the climax of the plot you spent 50+ hours on because other people are selfish and won't wait for you to watch it.

Yeah it's a fucked situation. Used to be back when I was first playing 2.0 that those dungeons had a bad rep because people that were trying to speed-farm it would yell at you for watching cutscenes. Now they're so overgeared for it that if you queue up to run it with randoms they just rush through and leave you behind because you're not needed.

And the instances are peppered with long story cutscenes apparently, to the point that you could be in one and everyone starts a boss fight (locking you out of the area) then runs the trash to the next boss and triggers the next cutscene while you're still watching the previous one. :|

It's a good idea in theory to have a couple of big epic 8-player dungeons at the end of the main story, but IMO they should add some way to do it solo and watch the story bits.

Yeah or have a flag for first time running or something that enforces cut scenes
The worst game for this I have found was Warframe. Take a wrong turn at the start and by the time you turn around and work out which way you should be going everything is dead

People are told there is someone in for the first time, and they get extra tokens for running the leveling roulette with players that are new to the instance. Doesn't change their behavior. They still want to speed-run and get it over with ASAP.

Forcing viewing the cutscenes because one player hasn't seen them would instead make everyone toxic toward that one player, and in these two dungeons it'd probably cause people to deliberately bail on the group.

Yeah, was thinking more doing it as part of the LFG deal. A flag people can set for "story based" or something so that if you go into that one they are locked, not a wholesale thing. Maybe increase the XP bonus or something for those ones

Bought a new hoodie the other week, since I decided I needed to expand past one & wanted a zip up, found a rad Alestorm one. The back text seems kind of fitting given where I work, not that, that kind of message promotes responsible service of alcohol, but eh..

Going through some old code that I may need to extend soon, chuckling at the tone of the comments. "Who wrote this pompous twaddle?" Looks at annotated source code: comment traced to revision 92, committed by os42. *facepalm*

\o/ car is all fixed and running again. It was the starter motor (thank god) got a replacement from Autobarn brand new for $115, had a mate come round help me install it. All I can say it thank god we have an air compressor with rattle gun, otherwise it wasn't coming off that easily lol.

Yeah. It was a total fluke I bought one, was in Bunnings & they had a bunch of their brand Ozito air tools on clearance I had everything else there sadly, but I picked up the rattle gun for $15 which was either half price or less.

Holy shit. LinusTechTips got to tour Deadmau5's house/studio. Damn. His house is amazing, some of the coolest shit i've seen. He alslo only has a 2 gigabit internet connection. Amazing studio set up & house in general. He has a rack of 16 Nvidia Tesla rendering GPU's... A shame the video won't be on YouTube for a week, I wanna show my mate who is a music producer lol.

Tried out the D3 necromancer with a friend last night... Levelling felt really clunky, with no obvious synergies between the skills (well, other than corpse explosion). We both opted to start by looking at building around the Pestilence set, at which point we realised the potential of stacking necromancers:corpses drop in the same-way as loot - ie. per-player. Combined with the pestilence set's corpse-lance-on-devour ability... XD We finished the night with a T8 GR. The first pack was a doozy, but once we got some corpses on the ground, we were basically chasing a hurricane of blood and bone across the map - every enemy killed was a corpse for each of us, every corpse consumed was a corpse lance that sought out nearby enemies and a 3000% damage bone spear to be cast into the maelstrom.

I can see this being stupidly fun for farming, but not entirely sure of its pushing potential, because of its reliance on being able to kill stuff quickly.

I went to New Zealand for a week to catch some of the Lions tour with some friends. A week of beer, rugby, beer, hobbits, beer, rugby... Excellent trip.

Had a couple of days in Sydney for work, and caught up with 2/3 of the previous night's Destiny raid group in meatspace in a pub! One of them is one of my oldest friends (we were at uni together nearly 25 years ago...), one's a very talkative Irishman (to be fair, I think that's just the default state for the Irish), and one was @os42 who I finally got to meat after a couple of years of being raiding/striking buddies... :) It was brilliant to finally catch-up. Sorry it was very brief. Also the beer was good but the venue wasn't, so you can pick next time... I'll try to make sure we don't have after hours changes next time I'm up! Took 'til 11pm to sort as the array we were reconfiguring decided we were wrong and it was right about the network config, and we had to reassure it we knew what we were doing. Stupid Equalogic...

Anyways, EOFY today and keeping fingers crossed nothing blows up so I can go home...

My Age Of Triumph t-shirt was on my desk when I got to work though, so that's nice.

Ah this pressure cooker/slow cooker is one of the best things i've bought for the kitchen. Just did a lamb & red wine stew in it. Apart from reducing the red wine with some peppercorns, nutmeg & cinnamon I only lightly fried the onions & celery along with the lamb. It smells & tastes amazing. Also got some thick cut crusty bread to go with!

I have no idea how i've gone all these years with out one. Everything i've done in it has turned out tender as & full of amazing flavour.

The lamb was pretty tasty, I was just bummed I didn't get around to having the Shiraz with it that the boss gave me ha. I still need to crack it, so I can see if it's as good as he tells me it is & then sell a few at work lol.

I'm having my first book professionally edited as we speak. Once done, I'll be formatting it for Kindle and uploading it online. This week I'll be setting up my Wordpress site and sorting out the domain... after that, I'm essentially a published author :D

It's called Afterglow, is a dystopian sci-fi Fantasy and will retail for under $3... but I'll likely post a few codes on TAY if there's interest.

Yeah thinking that.. Buuuut dad found a nice Italian gas stove with electric oven at the local Auctions they only want $175 ( they're $1,100 at The Good Guys) for it, it's in great nick. Just need an LP conversion kit for it, cause it's set up for natural gas..

But yeah, will be buying a new case & a few more drives, and probably a new SSD for it & then starting from scratch with probably an unraid set up, do it properly this time.

Just puttering around looking at Korean language when several korean letters jumped out to reveal the presence of a Roman Legion Eagle of the VIII in Korean Language.
Given the northern border of Korea is directly east of Rome it takes you by surprise.

Ha. So I scored a new computer today from the local auctions, $45 in total. It's a HP all in one touch screen. It's from 2012, so it's a little out dated. Buuuuuuut, it's specs are half decent for 2012.

It had Windows 10 installed on it, but I couldn't get in because the person who owned it before used a live account & I couldn't be bothered to try & gain access some way so I just formatted it & stuck a fresh copy of Windows 10 Home 64-bit on it & it runs really well, despite the slow speeds of a 5,400RPM drive.. Blu-Ray playback is smooth, the touch screen works flawlessly & is rather responsive. I can't believe this thing retailed for over $2,300 back in 2012 though.

The only other thing I want to do is replace the thermal paste on the CPU & GPU cause no doubt they're dried up & not transferring the heat that well to the heatsinks. Buuuuuut they seem to be a pain to access, heh.

Yeah AIO machines can be a bit of a bitch to get in to, but not impossible at least. Just takes some work. I'd consider replacing the HDD while you've got it open too. Or if there's a spare port, add in an SSD and use the 1.5 as mass storage. Decent deal though! Touch screen would make the $45 worth it on its own! :)

Yeah, I was gonna add an SSD, but sadly there is only the 2 sata connections from what I can see and the one for the blu-ray drive seems to be a power & data in one. I was thinking next best option & stick an SSHD in it, cause this WD Green is not only ancient but slow as balls.

But man I wish this was a separate screen, it's colours are amazing. I forgot how good IPS monitors are. One of the best bargains for PC stuff i've come across in a while. I'll probably end up putting it up for sale on one of those Facebook buy swap & sell sites. I'm sure someone out there needs a PC for a kid or something. If I had the room i'd keep it for mum & dad, but sadly I don't, plus i'm not sure if they'd make enough use of it to have it be worthwhile.

I've seen a few AIO machines that actually allowed you to feed a signal to it so it could be used as a second screen. What model is it?
Also, the power/data for the blu-ray drive could well be just a standard plug layout. Been a while since I opened one up, but I know a few I've worked on had a single plug, but when you unplugged it, it was just a standard sata data/power plug, just molded in to the same piece of plastic. You could likely get away with using the blu-ray externally if that's the case, and pop an ssd in there.

Sadly no video inputs at all, that was one of the downsides when I looked it up online, but! It does have a TV tuner though lol..

It probably does have a regular sata power & sata data connector but the terminating end at the drive is just a cable that goes into a little board with the connector for the drive. I'd be leaving the BD in it honestly since it's more of a pain to remove than i'd hoped. There's about 5 other things to remove to get to it, unlike the HDD which is simple to remove.

Ah cool. You can indeed use something like http://plugable.com/products/UGA-2K-A to extend the display, but according to HP, you can only mirror/duplicate with the touchscreen function enabled. To have it actually extend your desktop as a separate area, you need to disable the touch functions for that model :\

Did a beef dish for dinner tonight, based on a osso bucco recipe, just used chuck steak instead, cause osso bucco for some reason is over priced here atm. But it was pretty good, picked up a Hardy's 2016 Nottage Hill Cab Shiraz from work since it was $7 on clearance, worked well in it. Also included a bunch of mushrooms, carrot, potatoes & some celery. Turned out pretty tasty, had some thick cut crusty bread & nice Barossa shiraz The Colonel & The Merchant with it. I can now tell the boss I finally got around to trying it heh, should make him happy.

The boss is a bugger, he was talking about giving Gage Roads' Little Dove New World Pale Ale a go today, and I couldn't stop thinking about how nice of a beer it is. So I went back & bought a 4 pack after telling myself I didn't need any alcohol.. But it's a good beer, especially at 6.2% ABV.